From Senegambia to Sierra Leone and Back: Tracing the Path of Freetown's Lanterns

In Sierra Leone large illuminated floats are known as lanterns. During the 20th century they were paraded annually at night to mark the end of Ramadan. The tradition first emerged in Freetown (although it spread on a smaller scale to other parts of the country).

The fanaal tradition was documented by The Gambia National Museum in the 1980s. It was striking that fanaals always depicted ships. 

Clippers were a type of sailing ship designed for speed in the 19^th century. They inspired a distinctive form of fanaal that required considerable skill to design and build.

Ship lanterns were an early and enduring lantern form in Freetown. Unlike the Gambian fanaals recorded in the 1980s they were built on a massive scale to carry a human crew as in the case of ‘HMS Clarkson’ in 1997.

Despite differences in size Gambian fanaals and Freetown lanterns were clearly linked by their use of ship imagery. Another shared feature was the intricately cut patterned paperwork used to decorate the sides of fanaals.

The technique for producing this decorative paperwork was identical to that used in Sierra Leone to create exactly the same type of paper patterns to cover lanterns like ‘HMS Clarkson’ .

Often brightly decorated with balloons, crepe paper, tinsel and paper chains, each fanaal was lit internally by tiny electric light bulbs wired to a car battery that was charged during the day and carried beneath the fanaal at night.

Accompanied by musicians and by members of the group that had built it each fanaal was paraded individually every night between Christmas and New Year. It was then presented to its group's sponsor who would watch as the fanaal was whirled around to create a blaze of colour.

In 1877 an article in a French journal described a parade of fanaals (depicting a sailing ship and a mosque) that took place in 1876 in St Louis (Senegal) to jointly celebrate Christmas Eve and the Muslim festival of Eid-al-Adha.

Some Sierra Leoneans maintained this lantern tradition when they went to live elsewhere on the West African coast. In 1988 the Sierra Leonean Yoruba Muslim community in Banjul (The Gambia) hired a lantern builder from Freetown to build two small lanterns for them to mark the end of Ramadan.

A Sierra Leonean lantern builder living in Banjul built this lantern in 1989. It depicted al buraq, the winged, horse-like creature with a woman’s head said to have carried the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem and up into the heavens and back by night. 

This lantern was also built in 1989 in Banjul. The Sierra Leonean Muslims there clearly favoured lanterns that utilised religious imagery and themes to celebrate the end of the Islamic month of Ramadan.

Thus, for some time in the 20th century two traditions of building illuminated floats co-existed in the capital of The Gambia. On the one hand groups of Gambians built fanaals to celebrate the annual Christmas-New Year festivities.

On the other hand, at the end of Ramadan Yoruba Muslims of Sierra Leonean descent commissioned Sierra Leonean lantern builders to construct lanterns in the Freetown tradition. The two linked but divergent traditions happily co-existed side by side.